Then she looked at Shaw. A look of pure rage filled her face. “What’ve you done? What’ve you done?”
She vanished inside.
16.
Colter Shaw stood on a mesh catwalk inside the dim, cavernous manufacturing space. He crouched, listening.
Sounds, echoing from everywhere. Footsteps? Dripping water? The ancient structure settling? And then the roar of jet engines overhead. The factory was along the final approach path to San Francisco Airport. The gassy howl made it momentarily impossible to hear anything else.
Like someone coming up behind you.
Shaw had found one door that had not been secured with Sheetrock screws. He’d opened it and quickly stepped inside, closing it after him. He climbed to the third-floor catwalk so he could get an overview of the space below.
He saw no sign of Sophie or of X. Was the kidnapper still here? He would’ve guessed Shaw called for help. But he also might risk remaining for some minutes to find and murder Shaw, who might have some incriminating information, like his license tag number. Sophie Mulliner, of course, would die too.
He climbed down metal staircases to the ground floor, the labyrinth he’d surveyed from above, a network of offices, workstations, concrete slabs and machinery, presumably still here because technology had made the equipment obsolete, not even worth parts.
AGW Industries—Ground Floor
1 - K.B.
2 - Loading Dock
3 - Room with Five Objects
4 - Open Door
5 - Furnace Room/Smokestack
All surreal, in the gloom. Shaw was dizzy too; this, he guessed, was from air infused with the astringent fumes of diesel oil, grease and vast colonies of mold.
He spotted the window Sophie had broken—beside another catwalk on the fourth level—but there were no hiding spots there. She’d have gone to cover somewhere on the main floor. Shaw started through that level now, weaving around slabs and bins and machinery and workstations. He passed rows of rooms—ROTOR DESIGN II, ENGINEERING SUPERVISION, WAR DEPARTMENT LIAISON. Shaw paused beside each, listening—for breathing, for gritty scrapes underfoot, for that altered echo when a human takes up space in a room.
No, they were empty.
But one office was different from the others. Its door was closed and sealed with the same Sheetrock screws that held fast the outer doors. Shaw stopped. On the wall nearby was a crude painting—an approximation of the eerie stenciled face on the flyer in the Quick Byte Café. Which answered the question of who had tacked it up.
He turned back to the office with the sealed door. A crude hole, about two by two feet, had been cut and punched through the wall, from the inside out; bits of the plasterboard and dust lay on the floor outside. Shaw crouched and noted footprints in the white powder, small—Sophie’s? She hadn’t been wearing shoes or socks or been barefoot. It looked like she’d wrapped her feet in rags.
Listening again, his ear near the jagged hole, which was big enough—just—for a person to fit through.
The kidnapper might have stashed Sophie here and, somehow, she’d managed to free herself from the duct tape—which he’d surely used—and found something inside to break through the wall with. She’d probably tried to get out of the building and hadn’t found a door that wasn’t screwed shut.
He was debating his next steps when he heard a faint click to his right, followed by what might have been a low muttering sound, as if someone were angry he’d accidentally given himself away. It came from the end of a nearby corridor, between long metal walls lined with pipes and conduit. A sign read DON’T “BUCK” THE RULES: HARD HAT OR FINE. YOU CHOOSE!
At the end of the corridor were racks holding fifty-five-gallon oil drums and piles of lumber.
The muttering sound once more.
Sophie or X?
Then, his eyes growing yet more sensitive to the dimness, he could make out, at the end of the corridor, a shadow on the factory floor. It was moving slightly, cast by someone standing just out of sight, to the left at the T intersection of aisles.
Shaw couldn’t pass up the advantage. He’d ease slowly to the corner and step around fast. If the shadow belonged to X he’d secure the gun hand and take him down. He knew a number of ways to get someone onto the floor such that they weren’t inclined to get up anytime soon.
He moved closer. Twenty feet. Ten. Five.
The shadow shifted slightly, rocking back and forth.
Another step.
And Shaw walked right into the trap.
A tripwire. He went down fast and hard, getting his hands up just in time. The agonizing pushup saved his jaw from fracture. He rose, crouching, found himself looking at a sweatshirt hanging on a hook. To it was tied a piece of fishing line.
Which meant . . .
Before he could rise fully, an oil drum rolled from the rack and slammed into his shoulders. It was empty but the impact toppled him. He heard a voice, Sophie’s, screaming, “You son of a bitch! You killed him!”
The young woman was advancing on him, hair disheveled, eyes wide, her T-shirt stained. In her hand was what seemed to be a shiv, a homemade glass knife, the handle a strip of cloth wrapped around it.
Shaw muscled the drum off—it bounced loudly on the concrete. With that sound and the scream, X would know more or less where they were.
“Sophie!” Shaw whispered, climbing to his feet. “It’s okay! Don’t say anything.”
Her courage broke and she turned and fled.
“Wait,” he called in a whisper.
She vanished into another room and swung a solid-metal door shut behind her. Shaw followed, thirty feet away. He stuck to her path, where there’d be no more traps. He pushed open the door and found himself in a boiler or smelting room. Coal bins lined the walls, some still half filled. There was dust, ash and soot everywhere.
And light at the far end of a long row of furnaces.
Shaw followed her footsteps, toward the cool illumination, whose source filtered down from a hundred feet above him; Shaw stood at the base of the smokestack. With less concern about the environment in the factory’s working days, the furnaces would have spewed fumes into the air throughout the south Bay Area. In the middle of the base was a pit, fifteen feet across, filled with a gray-brown muck, presumably ancient ash and coal dust mixed with rainwater.
Shaw was looking for Sophie’s footprints.
Which had simply vanished.